Christianity at the Crossroads

The Global Church from the Print Revolution to the Digital Era

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Combining expansive storytelling with striking analysis of 'networks, nodes, and nuclei', David Hempton's new book explains major developments in global Christianity between two communication revolutions: print and the internet. His novel approach (replete with vivid metaphor – we read of wildflower gardens and fungi, of exploding fireworks sending sparks of possibility in all directions, and of forests with vast interconnected root systems hidden below our vision) allows him to look beyond institutional hierarchies, traverse national and denominational boundaries, and think more deeply about the underlying conditions promoting, or resisting, adaptation and change. It also enables him to explore the crossroads, or junction boxes, where individuals and ideas encountered different traditions and from which something fresh and dynamic emerged. Cogently addressing the rise of empires, transformation of gender relations, and demographic shifts in world Christianity from the West to the Global South, this book is a masterful contribution to contemporary religious history.

• Allows readers to get a big-picture, bottom-up overview of some of the most important developments in global Christianity over the past five hundred years, looking beyond church hierarchies at the stories of the marginal, demotic and sometimes disenfranchised
• David Hempton is one of the foremost historians of religion and of church history currently at work, and this book is much anticipated
• A revised and expanded version of the 2021 Gifford Lectures, one of the most prestigious and famous lecture series in the worldwide humanities
• Introduces a new theory of change around the concepts of networks, nodes, and nuclei, while using ordinary, easily comprehensible, language and examples throughout